DNA hunt keeps brother's hopes alive

Somewhere inside a battleship that billowed smoke and burning fuel oil died the boy Joe had been orphaned with years before -- the young man who had followed him into the Navy, whose snapshot Joe has kept ever since.

Exactly where or how, Joe never learned.

Long after Campbell learned his brother was killed on the USS Arizona, salvage crews lifting the ship's No. 4 gun turret noted they had found another body.

They had already found dozens, and hundreds more were entombed below, in 71/2 fathoms of water. But few had died in this part of the ship. Years later, an aging sailor told Campbell that is where his brother had been.

With Hollywood's new movie on the attack having opened Friday and scientists worried about the soundness of the giant, sunken Arizona shrine, a much smaller Pearl Harbor drama is unfolding in a military laboratory in Rockville, Md.

Experts are working to extract DNA from a bone fragment from Turret No. 4, hoping that 60 years later they can tell Campbell what became of his brother.

It would be a glorious and historic connection. None of the unknowns recovered from the Arizona has ever been identified, officials say. So far the work has been fruitless, and researchers say an answer may prove elusive.

But the effort, a result of years of digging by Campbell, friends and amateur Pearl Harbor historians, also recalls the story of what has become of one of the icons of American history.

Like Ford's Theatre, the Alamo, Dealey Plaza and Gettysburg, the Arizona has become "a place" that floats in the national psyche, forever broken by Japanese bombers and gushing smoke on a sparkling Sunday.

Navy was `family' to brothers

For Campbell and his brother, the Navy, and the USS Arizona, promised a family they had never known.

Their father placed them in a Denver orphan asylum in 1923 after their mother was hospitalized with tuberculosis. She died two years later.

Their father visited once and died four years after his wife, also of TB.

At 18, Bill was in a camp run by the federal Civilian Conservation Corps in Colorado Springs. Joe, 20, was in the Navy. When he was ordered to destroyer duty in San Diego, he visited Bill en route. Bill was taken with his Navy uniform.

Joe pulled out his camera and took a few shots of Bill, standing in the sun with his big smile and wavy hair.

Then they parted, Joe to San Diego, Bill back to camp. He joined the Navy and was assigned to the USS Arizona.

Joe never saw him again.

In December 1941, the Arizona was about to head to the West Coast for Christmas after four months at Pearl Harbor.

On Friday, Dec. 5, it moored at Berth F-7, to be refueled for the trip home Dec. 13.

Joe Campbell was on a minesweeper in New Jersey the morning of Dec. 7. He cried in the ship's engine room after hearing of the attack. Of the Arizona's 1,514 men, only 337 survived.

In 1991, with Pearl Harbor's 50th anniversary approaching, he joined the USS Arizona Reunion Association, attending meetings and showing the old snapshot.

At the association's anniversary reunion at Pearl Harbor, he stepped to the podium, held up the snapshot, and asked whether anyone knew his brother. A man named John Harris said he had known Bill well. Now 80, the retired Army civilian worker from Linden, Texas, said Bill had been assigned to the ship's 4th Division.

That clue, lost along with most of the ship's records, placed Bill toward the Arizona's stern, where the 4th Division's quarters were, and near Turret No. 4, the battle station for most of the division's sailors.

Campbell said he, Harris and other amateur Pearl Harbor historians then uncovered an officer's account indicating that an unidentified sailor had been sent below to flood a rear gunpowder magazine to prevent further explosions as the ship was being abandoned. He had not survived. Their research showed only two from the 4th Division had died in the attack, and Bill was the only one unaccounted for.

Body in Turret No. 4

It seemed a good bet that the body in Turret No. 4 was Bill's, he said.

Two years ago Campbell took his case to the Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu. The lab did some research and, while not endorsing Campbell's theory, found the case compelling.

The remains from Turret No. 4 had been buried in Honolulu's National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, where the identification lab and the Defense Department's DNA lab already were working on IDs for Korean War unknowns.

Workers exhumed the remains, sending a bone specimen to Rockville, where Campbell had sent blood. But because of a chemical used to treat remains during the 1940s and '50s, the Rockville experts had been having difficulty extracting DNA from the cemetery specimens. To the lab's frustration, the Turret 4 remains were no exception.

The scientists haven't given up. One solution may be to test bone from a different part of the remains.